Zitat von »David Weber«

.II.

Midnight came midday with the curse of God.
Mountains took flame and valleys were clawed
By talons of fire and fountains of stone
As children died in the darkness alone
When light disappeared and Home was crushed
In floodtides of death and a torrent of dust.

Tumult, destruction, devastation, and fear.
And out of the darkness, silence.
— The Dark Fall Saga.

* * * * * * * * * *

The shuttle banked gracefully, standing on its port wing tip, and Eloise Pritchart gazed down at a mountain valley. It was a shallow valley, except where the river had cut a path down its center. There the almost flat valley floor plunged for over thirty meters, suddenly and steeply, to the level of the stream.

Thin plumes of steam rose from the jagged, truncated summits of two mountains at the northern end of the valley. A lake filled the bottom of the yawning caldera where a third, even larger mountain had once stood on its eastern rim, and she shivered inside as her eyes traced the tortured, frozen lava field stretching down from it into the valley’s heart. The volcanologists Rob Pierre had exported to the planet all agreed no fresh eruption was imminent, but they also agreed that there’d been at least six of them over the past thirteen or fourteen centuries.

As the shuttle swept lower, she saw the shadows of the excavations along the eastern bank of the Despair River, between the stream and the caldera, and that inner shiver turned into an arctic chill. The archaeologists working the site didn’t even look up as her shuttle passed overhead. Their attention was on something that had happened long, long ago.

On the reason that river was called Despair.

“God, what must it have been like?” she wondered out loud.

“I doubt anyone who wasn’t here could even imagine,” Theisman said softly from the seat beside hers. “And, frankly, I’m glad I can’t.”

“I think I agree with you.” Pritchart leaned her forehead against the viewport, gazing aft to keep the excavations in sight as the shuttle flew past and began to climb once more. They were still a thirty-minute flight from Mountain Fort, the planetary capital. Or administrative center, at least. But as sobering as she’d found the overflight, she’d insisted on making it before they landed.

“I think I agree,” she repeated, sitting back in her seat. “Especially if Baranav was right when he dated Anderson.” She shook her head. “How could anyone find the will to go on after two disasters like that?”

“We’ll never know,” Theisman replied. “Not for sure. But I think Anderson probably got it pretty close to right. Parents don’t lie down and die when their kids’ lives are on the line. And most of the people with any quit in them were probably dead even before it happened, given everything they’d already been through. They had to’ve been tougher than nails to get as far as Sanctuary in the first place.”

Pritchart nodded soberly as her mind ran back over the incredible cascade of coincidences, unlikelihoods, and outright impossible accomplishments that had brought her and Theisman to this planet at this moment.

From their perspective, that cascade began less than forty T-years ago; for the Sanctuarians and their ancestors, it had begun almost two thousand years ago, in 40 PD, when the colony ship Calvin’s Hope had departed the Sol System on the 395-light-year voyage to their new home. Despite the fact that their vessel was fitted with improved particle screening, capable of sustaining a normal-space velocity of seventy percent of light-speed, her passengers had expected to spend over five and a half centuries in cryo sleep.

In fact, it had taken them just a bit longer than that, although the rest of the galaxy hadn’t known that. In fact, most of the galaxy stil l didn’t know that.

But the Republic of Haven did, and that was the source of Eloise Pritchart’s moral quandary.

No one in Nouveau Paris had ever expected to discover a wormhole terminus less than seventy light-years from the Haven System, associated with the planetless, barren M3 dwarf listed solely as J-156-18(L).

The discovery had been a distinct shock for the survey crew which detected the J-156-18(L) Terminus in 1879 PD literally by accident. Their ship hadn’t even been supposed to visit the thoroughly useless star. Indeed, her skipper had stopped off en route to the far more promising J-193-18(L) System to let his crew train on a star about which everything was already known . . . only to discover that not quite “everything” had been known after all.

J-156-18(L) was useless as a home for mankind, but there’d been vast excitement in Nouveau Paris when the wormhole was reported. A crew of proper hyper-physicists had been dispatched immediately and quickly discovered that it was one terminus of a 583.8-LY warp bridge . . . and that its other terminus was the KCR-126-04 System.

KCR-126-04.

That news must have struck the Legislaturalists as one of the bleakest bad jokes in the entire universe, because that star system — also known as the Calvin System — lay at the heart of one of the great tragedies of pre-Warshawski sail history, and a more useless piece of real estate would have been impossible to imagine.

The G4 star had once been touted as prime real estate for interstellar colonization, with a habitable planet which could have been Old Terra’s twin . . . only better. The reports of the daredevil hyper-space survey teams had waxed almost poetic describing the planet Calvin III’s temperature, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and the glorious nights of its triple moons. Bidding for the colonization rights had been brisk, despite the vast distance from Sol, and the Calvin Expedition had departed Old Terra only seventeen T-years after the Beowulf expedition.

Without Warshawski sails, no colony expedition was mad enough to make a voyage that long through hyper, and the expedition to Calvin was no exception. Its organizers had accepted the risks of a 560-year normal-space voyage as by far the lesser of two evils, and they’d invested not just money but intelligence and imagination to provide against them.

Unfortunately, no one’s imagination had included a dinosaur killer fit to dwarf the impact which had put a punctuation point to Old Terra’s Cretaceous period at Chicxulub. The Chicxulub Crater was a hundred and eighty kilometers in diameter; the Calvin III Crater was over three hundred, and from the available evidence, that massive celestial hammer must have struck less than fifty years before the cryo-sleep colony ship reached its destination in 604 PD. Even today, thirteen T-centuries later, the planet Calvin remained a bleak, barren place whose shattered ecosystem had scarcely begun to heal. In fact, most climatologists and biologists were unsure where they were observing a recovery or simply the final throes and death rattle of an entire planet’s slow, lingering murder.

In 604, no colony could possibly have survived upon its surface.

No one had ever known what had happened to Calvin’s Hope and her doomed passengers. The “slow boat” colony ships had been designed for one-way trips, without the endurance and capacity to return to their destination. The colonists who’d settled the planet Grayson had discovered the downsides of that, although theirs might be something of an extreme example, given the way they’d deliberately disabled their ship’s cryo facilities upon arrival. But Calvin’s Hope had been a less capable design to begin with, and she’d exhausted her entire planned endurance reaching Calvin in the first place. Even without the . . . questionable decision of Austin Grayson and the other Elders of the Church of Humanity Unchanged, there’d been no way she could possibly have taken her passengers home, and there’d been no way at all to send any messages back to the Sol System across 400 LY.

Nor had there been any point, six hundred T-years before Adrienne Warshawski made hyper-space safe for colony ship-sized transports.

A follow-on expedition with proper Warshawski sails had finally been sent in 1406, but it found no trace of the colonists or their ship. And so Calvin’s Hope had vanished into history alongside the Agnes Celeste and a hundred other legendary interstellar shipwrecks and mysteries.

The Havenite hyper-physicists who’d set out so jubilantly to explore the J-156-18(L) Terminus had returned subdued and shaken by the wrecked star system they’d discovered at the far end. They’d known where they were, of course — Calvin was one of the epic tragedies of the Diaspora, cited in every history of human exploration written since the fifteenth century — but none of them had ever expected to actually see it.

The Legislaturalists, immune to the poignancy of the long-ago tragedy, had immediately started laying ambitious plans to open the warp bridge to interstellar commerce. They’d hoped for a terminus in a more useful location, of course, preferably one with inhabited star systems suitable for trade — or, Legislaturalists being Legislaturalists, for conquest — in the vicinity. It was regrettable that the region around KCR-126-04 was dominated by M and K-class stars, with the limited liquid-water zones of their kind, which was what had made KCR-126-04’s G4 primary and the survey crews’ rhapsodic reports on Calvin III such a surprise. There’d never been anything else in close proximity to it to attract settlement, however, when there were so very many other stars with far more promising possibilities. Still, KCR-126-04 was only 170 LY from Asgerd and less than four hundred from Old Terra itself, outflanking the Manticoran Wormhole Junction. Surely that had to be useful!

DRM (...) represent(s) an exercise in mindless stupidity that would shame any self-respecting dinosaur
Eric Flint; http://www.baens-universe.com/articles/principle
Random pithy quote: Never take life seriously. Nobody gets out alive anyway.. (jiltanith.thefifthimperium.com)

Zitat von »David Weber«

Regrettably, they’d soon realized it wasn’t, really. Asgerd might be only 170 LY away, but that was still a 58-day voyage for a merchant vessel, and that was the closest inhabited system. However they looked at it, there wouldn’t be any local magnets for interstellar shipping, and it wouldn’t even give the People’s Republic any readier access to the Solarian merchants selling it goods at exorbitant prices. At that time, twenty-five T-years before the Battle of Hancock, commerce between the PRH and the Solarian League had passed through the Manticoran Wormhole Junction. For a trip from the Haven System to the Sol System, the new warp bridge would actually have required a normal-space voyage more than three times as long as the Haven-Trevor’s Star-Manticore-Beowulf-Sol route.

There would be very little traffic across their new warp bridge, they decided. In fact, its discovery had given added point to the value of . . . acquiring the Star Kingdom of Manticore and played a not insignificant part in their subsequent strategic thinking. Coordinated with the far larger, much more far-reaching Manticore Junction’s Gregor Terminus and the Durandel-Asgerd bridge, their new route would turn into a likely profit maker after all. And so they’d kept quiet about it . . . especially after one of Hereditary President Harris’ advisers had pointed out its potential value as a staging point for an unexpected attack upon Manticore from a completely different direction.

Assuming, of course, that any such attack was ever made necessary by Manticore’s relentless economic war against the hardworking proletarians of the People’s Republic, he’d added, undoubtedly with a suitably pious expression.

The Peoples Navy was both more pragmatic and less prone to hypocrisy when it came to conquering other people than its political masters. But it was also less enthusiastic about any military value the new warp bridge might possess, given the 200 LY between Calvin and Manticore. There was, the Octogan had patiently pointed out, no need for staging bases that far from their target just because they wanted to attack from a “different direction.” Particularly given that there was no such thing as — or need for — “different directions” for an assault launched through hyper-space, since no one could see it coming until it translated back into n-space at its target anyway. Nonetheless, the Harris Administration had insisted that the PN at least “explore the possibilities,” and Admiral Cargill, Amos Parnell’s predecessor as CNO had agreed to comply, then handed the assignment off to one of her underlings with instructions to Do Something and keep the damned politicians off her back.

The “something” in this case turned out to be a follow-up expedition charged with evaluating the system’s possible military utility and what it would take to capitalize upon it. Everyone involved had understood it was basically make work to keep the politicians happy, but they’d been told to spend long enough to make it look good and to produce a comprehensive report demonstrating how earnestly the Navy had complied with its orders. In the event, the expedition’s commander had decided that since the planet Calvin itself was obviously unsuitable as a site for any planetary installations, surveying the closest half-dozen or so neighboring star systems for possible alternate bases should certainly convince the Navy’s political masters of how thoroughly it had applied itself to carrying out its vital mission.

What he’d never even imagined he might discover in the process was the answer to what had become of Calvin’s Hope.

No one knew how she’d come to her final resting place, 14.4 LY from her original destination, in the L5 Lagrange point between the second planet of the KCR-126-06 system and its solitary moon, but they did know it must have been the stuff of legends.

It was amazing enough that Calvin’s Hope still existed, but she was only a bare hull, stripped to the bone by her passengers and crew before they’d left her forever for the planet they’d named Sanctuary. Not even the Legislaturalists had been prepared to disturb — desecrate — her after all these centuries, and the subsequent development of Sanctuary’s orbital industry had been kept scrupulously clear of her final resting place.

How she’d crossed the fourteen light-years from her original destination to the feeble warmth of the K8v star her passengers had renamed Refuge was one of the things no one would ever know, however. Undoubtedly, that information had been in her computers once upon a time, but the computer cores had been stripped along with everything else that could possibly be taken down to Sanctuary, and so no one would ever be able to celebrate her epic achievement as it properly deserved.

Yet she’d done her job. Somehow, she’d gotten her people to a new home after all. She delivered her cargo of fragile human beings to a habitable planet — quite a lovely one, actually — despite the fact that she’d never been intended for the additional voyage, and the colonists must have heaved an enormous sigh of relief.

But the universe hadn’t been finished with the Calvin Expedition just yet.

There was no written history of the colony’s earliest days, either. None of the official histories other colonies maintained. Not even a single diary.

What there was was only a heroic saga, Dark Fall, attributed to the semi-mythical bard Anderson, the Sanctuarian Homer. Sanctuarian historians believed Dark Fall had probably been composed within a hundred local years after landing, because its earliest known manuscript version was in still recognizable Standard English, and Standard English had been a dead language on Sanctuary for almost a thousand T-years. Later written versions had also been found, in at least three of Sanctuary’s indigenous ancient languages, although with significant variations. Clearly it had been passed on in a purely oral tradition during the colonists’ long, desperate struggle to survive after the events it described.

Sanctuary had lost its entire pre-colonization history during that struggle. It had lost even basic literacy and evolved its own mythic interpretations of how humankind had come to exist. When literacy reemerged, it was in entirely different languages, and in the wake of their own belated Scientific Revolution, Sanctuarian scholars had put Dark Fall into the same category as all the other obviously fanciful creation myths.

Until the Standard English manuscript was discovered. It wasn’t complete — at least a dozen stanzas were missing — but the Sanctuarian languages retained enough words from Standard English for those scholars to make at least a partial translation of it and realize what it purported to be. Despite its obvious antiquity, the majority of those scholars had continued to consider the entire saga and all the nightmare events it described a pure work of fiction. But not all of them had concurred, and the historian Baranav had become the Sanctuarian Schliemann when he decided to take Anderson at his word, despite the mockery that evoked from the majority of his colleagues.

The mockery which had ended abruptly when his research and excavations located the mythological city of Home on the banks of the Despair River and confirmed the saga’s fundamental accuracy.

DRM (...) represent(s) an exercise in mindless stupidity that would shame any self-respecting dinosaur
Eric Flint; http://www.baens-universe.com/articles/principle
Random pithy quote: Never take life seriously. Nobody gets out alive anyway.. (jiltanith.thefifthimperium.com)

Zitat von »David Weber«

According to Dark Fall, the colonists’ chosen site for the enclave they’d named simply Home had been in a fertile, sheltered mountain valley. After the ordeal of finding a habitable planet in the first place, Landing Valley had seemed a paradise. But no one had suspected how tectonically active the mountains around Home were. Not until sometime shortly after the last shuttle had made its final trip into space and returned, when a mountain above Landing Valley had exploded in an eruption that had dwarfed that of Old Terra’s Vesuvius in 2024 PD. It had been followed by a series of seismic shocks which had gone on for days or weeks — or even months. Dark Fall claimed they’d lasted for an entire year, but surely that had to be an exaggeration!

Or possibly not.

Baranav’s excavations had conclusively demonstrated that there’d been multiple eruptions over the centuries since the one Sanctuary’s geologists had labeled the Dark Fall Eruption, but the one which had overwhelmed Home had apparently been both the first and the worst. However long it had lasted, the disaster had been more than sufficient to bury the enclave under forty meters of pyroclastic flow and mud.

Anderson claimed that well over half of Home’s inhabitants had died in that dreadful eruption, and the remainder had been left with only scraps of technology as they faced the task of somehow surviving on their alien homeworld.

Ellis Pritchart had no idea how they’d done it, but they had. Yet if humanity had survived on Sanctuary, it had done so only after a struggle at least as terrible as that of any planet its species had ever settled. Unlike a planet like Grayson, Sanctuary didn’t try to kill them every single day. Indeed, aside from the Dark Fall Eruption, it had hardly tried to kill them at all. But the Dark Fall Eruption had almost been enough by itself. The Sanctuarians might have survived it, yet they’d lost not only all advanced technology but all true memory of who they were or how they’d come to the world upon which they lived.

By the time the People’s Republic discovered the KCR-126-04 Terminus, Sanctuary had just finished reinventing the telegraph, discovered the germ theory of disease, and begun the transition from waterpower to steam. The planetary population had increased to just under a billion, despite how savagely it had been winnowed, because aside from its volcanism — which was, admittedly, more pronounced than on all but a handful of other inhabited worlds — Sanctuary’s environment was extraordinarily benign. The planet had very little axial tilt, giving it extremely mild seasons, human biochemistry was resistant to almost all of its native diseases, and it was readily apparent that the Dark Fall Eruption’s survivors had managed to preserve their domestic animals, as well as themselves.

But Sanctuary’s steadily growing population had remained trapped at the bottom of its gravity well, which was particularly ironic, given Refuge’s deep-space industrial potential. Had they retained access to the technology with which they’d arrived, Refuge would have become one of the most populous, heavily industrialized star systems in the known galaxy. It possessed not one asteroid belt, or even the three belts of a star like Manticore-B. It had six of them, including the 62,000,000-kilometer wide Epsilon Belt fifteen light-minutes beyond the system hyper-limit. Indeed, subsequent analysis from the Calvin III Crater suggested that the dinosaur killer which had devastated the colonists’ original destination had been a stray from Epsilon.

Anyone but the People’s Republic of Haven would have immediately announced the discovery of the lost Calvin Expedition's descendents. The Legislaturalists, however, had seen an enormous opportunity. Not only was Refuge incredibly rich in raw materials, but it offered a labor force almost a billion strong. A labor force without a single clue about what lay beyond the bounds of their own planetary atmosphere . . . or of the staggering wealth their system’s astrography represented.

A labor force which ought to be eager to repay its deliverers for the wonders of the modern technology — the almost magical technology — they brought with them.

It was the sort of situation a bureaucrat in the Solarian League’s Office of Frontier Security could only dream of.

Of course, there’d been a certain amount of startup expense, but once the Sanctuarians had been given the tools, they’d dug in even more enthusiastically than the Manties’ Graysons. And the Legislaturalists — and, later, the Committee of Public Safety — had been able to send thousands upon thousands of teachers, doctors, supervisors, and engineers from places like Cerberus and the other prisons in which they had stowed away so many “dangerous recidivists.”

Which was how, thirty-seven T-years later, the Refuge System had come to be home to the Bolthole Complex, the biggest and most modern shipyard and industrial nexus of the entire Republic of Haven. Indeed, despite its still tiny population (by Core World standards), Bolthole’s capacity was superior to that of any Fringe World and at least a quarter of the League’s Core systems.

An industrial complex, she thought now, which rightfully belongs to the people of Sanctuary, not to us! And what possible right – what excuse — can we have for keeping those same people penned up inside their own star system? Hasn’t the galaxy done enough to these people without us taking advantage of their tragedy?

No doubt it had, but Theisman was obviously right about at least two things.

DRM (...) represent(s) an exercise in mindless stupidity that would shame any self-respecting dinosaur
Eric Flint; http://www.baens-universe.com/articles/principle
Random pithy quote: Never take life seriously. Nobody gets out alive anyway.. (jiltanith.thefifthimperium.com)

Zitat von »David Weber«

At the moment, he and his fleet commanders – especially Javier Giscard and Lester Tourville — were engaged in a bitter five-way civil war which would ultimately decide the future of the Republic of Haven. If Theisman’s Navy won, Eloise Pritchart might actually be allowed to restore the Péricard Constitution, the goal for which she’d fought for over forty T-years. If it lost, God only knew what would become of the Republic. The momentum had been shifting steadily in Theisman’s favor for the last several months, but that was always subject to change, especially if they suffered heavy losses. Little wonder the Secretary of War had thought a secret shipyard, hidden away in his back pocket in case he needed it, would make a splendid insurance policy.

As the last commanding officer of the Capital Fleet under Oscar Saint-Just, he’d been thoroughly briefed on Bolthole’s capabilities, although they’d only just begun actually delivering ships at that point. He’d also been able to discover its location, and the fact that Saint-Just had personally selected People’s Commissioner Jacqueline Hammond, one of his most senior and trusted StateSec commissioners, to oversee Bolthole and ensure its reliability.

And Thomas Theisman had been only too well aware of the consequences if a shipbuilding complex of that capacity remained in the hands of StateSec loyalists.

Which was why he’d sent his own people’s commissioner, Dennis LePic, to visit Hammond with a dispatch from Saint-Just . . . who’d happened to be dead at the moment. As a fellow people’s commissioner, LePic had been able to get close enough to personally deliver his actual message — from Theisman, not Saint-Just. As it happened, he was an excellent shot, and his “administrative assistants” had delivered the same message simultaneously to Citizen Commissioner Hammond’s entire staff. At which point the “StateSec” superdreadnought which had transported them to Refuge brought up her sidewalls, identified herself as a regular Navy ship, and suggested it would be a good idea to listen to the new System Administrator.

There’d been some scattered resistance by State Security personnel. But no one had been that foolish within range of PHNS Péricard’s energy batteries, and what little resistance there had been, in more distant parts of the system, had ended quickly. Hammond and her staff had been dead and the Navy personnel assigned to Bolthole all knew. Thomas Theisman’s reputation. Ninety percent of them had rallied to LePic, and that had been that.

Yet Theisman had refused to use any of the superdreadnoughts being built in Refuge against his opponents, and that was because of his second — and, Pritchart thought, far more important argument — for maintaining the Bolthole status quo.

She’d seen enough of Thomas Theisman by now to realize Javier had been right. None of the warlords contending for Rob Pierre’s mantle were remotely his equal as a strategist or as a leader, and not one of them could match his ability to inspire the men and women under his command. They truly believed they could end the long nightmare which had enveloped their star nation for so long, and they believed he was the commander who could make that possible. Eventually, he was going to win, with or without the Bolthole ships, and, in the process, allow Pritchart to restore not just the Péricard Constitution but also a Republic worthy of that constitution.

And when she did, what happened next?

Neither Theisman nor Pritchart had any desire to continue the People’s Republic’s conquering ways, but they had a moral obligation to liberate any Havenite star systems currently under occupation by the Manticoran Alliance. Pritchart was realist enough to accept that not all those star systems wanted to be liberated, and it was hard to blame them, given the contrast between their experiences under foreign occupation and what they’d experienced under the “benevolence” of their legal government. Assuming the Manties and their allies were prepared to agree to genuine plebiscites to determine those systems’ future, she had no objection to their declaring their independence of the Republic which had acquired so many of them through conquest.

Unfortunately, it was becoming increasingly obvious that the Manties had no intention of agreeing to anything of the sort.

Neither Pritchart nor her foreign policy experts — including Kevin Usher, one of the canniest analysts she’d ever met . . . and the only one she trusted without qualification — were sure exactly why the High Ridge Government refused to negotiate in good faith, but it was obvious that it did. And not just about future plebiscites. Elaine Descroix, the Manticoran Foreign Secretary, might keep blathering away about the need to be certain the Pritchart Administration was both the legitimate Havenite government and likely to survive before Manticore “legitimized” it by negotiating with it. Her correspondence might include all sorts of dangled carrots for the wonderful day when Pritchart had demonstrated — to Manticoran satisfaction, of course — that her government wa s going to survive. But in the meantime, she had no intention of beginning even preliminary discussion of a single one of the points in contention between Landing and Nouveau Paris.

Not one.

And that meant that, for whatever reason, Prime Minister High Ridge had decided against negotiating an actual peace treaty. And, far worse, the current balance of military power justified his arrogant refusal far too completely for him to be likely to change his mind anytime soon. The Republic of Haven Navy had none of the pod-laying superdreadnoughts armed with the multidrive missiles which had driven Oscar Saint-Just to the brink of surrender before the last-second reprieve of the Cromarty Assassination put High Ridge into the premiership. The Havenite Civil War, for all its bloodshed and carnage, was being fought by obsolete ships armed with obsolescent weapons, and only the fact that none of the adversaries had access to modern weapons had permitted it to go on so long.

Just as any imaginable confrontation between those obsolete ships and the massive firepower of the Royal Manticoran Navy and its Grayson allies could end only in one-sided massacre.

Without some effective countermeasure to the Manty wall of battle and the Star Kingdom’s new-model LACs, there was no way to force High Ridge to come to the negotiating table in good faith. He was one of the very few interstellar politicians who, in Pritchart’s considered opinion, was at least as bad as the Legislaturalists had been, and he believed — with reason — that he held the whip hand. As long as he did, he would continue his current policies, and it was entirely possible — likely — that if he suspected even for a moment that the Republic was in the process of acquiring that sort of countermeasure, he would order the RMN to resume the offensive immediately to force Haven’s unconditional surrender before it did.

Which was Theisman’s entire point, because exactly “that sort of countermeasure” was what was being built right here in Refuge.

How do I resolve this? she thought bitterly. I’m the President of the Republic of Haven. Obviously, my first and highest responsibility is to my citizens, not the Sanctuarians or anyone else in the damned galaxy! And over and above that, what about my responsibility to the men and women like Javier and Lester — and Theisman — who’ve already fought and died for the Constitution we’re trying to restore? But morally, how do I justify continuing to treat Refuge and everyone living here the same way Frontier Security treats its ‘clients’ . . . only more so. At least the rest of the galaxy knows the Protectorates exist! That puts some limits on what OFS and its cronies can get away with where they’re concerned. But Refuge . . . .

She leaned back against her seat’s head rest as the shuttle raced onward toward Mountain Fort and closed her eyes.

Zitat von »David Weber«

.III.

Long grass blows on the banks of Despair,
Guarding the graves of the dead.
Mountain storms weep for the sleeping,
And the God of the vanished
Walks through the hills
Calling the names of the gone.
— The Dark Fall Saga.

* * * * * * * * * *

“Madame President.”

The tall, silver haired man stood and walked around his desk to offer Eloise Pritchart his hand. Like most Sanctuarians, he was dark-skinned and that silver hair had once been dark brown, but his eyes were a light, startling blue. And like far too many Sanctuarians, he’d been too old for Prolong when the People’s Republic discovered Refuge.

At least that’s one damned thing the Legislaturalists got right, Pritchart thought as she crossed the spacious office to meet him. They even offered it universally, not restricted solely to people working for them, the way they did the advanced degree programs.

“Shirkahna Ambart,” she responded taking his hand in the three-fingered grip that was the Sanctuarian version of a handshake.

Shirkahna was her host’s title, which the protocolists told her translated literally as “shepherd” but could also be translated as both “warlord” or “sentinel.” Apparently, Sanctuarian was a . . . flexible language. However it translated, however, Shirkahna Ambart VIII was the hereditary ruler of Ankhassar, Sanctuary’s most ancient and powerful pre-rediscovery empire. That had simplified things when the Legislaturalists went looking for someone to run the native side of the planet for them.

Like all Sanctuarians, the shirkahna used only one name publicly. Legally, Sanctuary usage attached both a patronymic and a matronymic, so technically, he was Ambart Ambartson-Melynyson, although no one would ever address him as such.

“Please, be seated,” he invited, escorting her across the sunny chamber towards a conversational nook below the windows overlooking the paved courtyard below. Sheila Thiessen, the head of Pritchart’s personal security detail, drifted silently and unobtrusively along behind. Aside from bodyguards and high ranking military offiers, no armed Sanctuarian was ever allowed in the shirkahana’s presence, yet Ambart took no notice at all of Thiessen’s presence.

He waved Pritchart into a comfortable armchair, looking out through the tower window at a deep blue sky. Anvil-headed cumulonimbus clouds swept towards Mountain Fort, crowned in the flicker of distant lightning, and the temperature had been dropping steadily when she arrived. In fact, her shuttle flight crew had clearly been relieved to get her safely on the ground before the looming thunderstorms arrived.

She hoped the weather wasn’t some sort of metaphor for her visit.

Below the fourth-floor window, the city of Mountain Fort sprawled out about the looming castle which had given its name to the entire city. Mountain Fort had been Ankhassa’s imperial city for the past six hundred local years. Its population would scarcely have qualified as a moderate-sized town on Nouveau Paris, but its quarter-million people made it the largest city on Sanctuary and the low-lying architecture of a pre-counter-grav civilization made it look even larger.

“Thank you for making an opportunity for me to meet with you,” she said as Thiessen settled behind her shoulder.

“Under the circumstances, it seemed the thing to do.” Ambart’s Standard English carried a slight accent — he’d been in his mid-thirties before he learned to speak it — but the edge of dry amusement came through clearly and he tilted his head to one side. “In fact, I was rather surprised that you requested a meeting. I believe the highest ranking member of Haven’s government ever to visit Refuge — civilian member, I mean — was Foreign Secretary Bergen when he signed our intial treaty with my father. And I fear the People’s Republic’s — I mean, the Republic’s — representatives’ contacts since have been a bit more . . . peremptory, shall we say?”

“I’m afraid that’s been my own observation,” the shirkahna said. “Which, I trust you’ll forgive me for pointing out, seemed to just a bit . . . ironic for such an egalitarian regime.”

Pritchart hid a wince, although his point was well taken. Especially coming from a man whose family had ruled almost a third of his homeworld for the last several centuries.

“You’re right,” she said. “In fact, having waded through the last thirty or forty T-years of reports, memos, and correspondence, I’d have to say that I detect a certain . . . imperious note in all of the previous regime’s conversations with you.”

“I’m sure you do. Although, to be fair, I doubt many Sanctuarians would find that out of place. The average lifespan here on Sanctuary, even for those without Prolong, has increased by thirty percent since the Republic discovered us. The standard of living has probably risen by no more than, oh, ten or twenty thousand percent, and it’s continued to follow a steadily rising trajectory for over half my lifetime.” He smiled almost whimsically. “Against that backdrop, a certain degree of what I suppose one might call proprietary authority is probably understandable.”

“Understandable but not exactly commendable,” Pritchart said. He arched an eyebrow at her, and she shrugged with less than complete happiness.

“Shirkahna Ambart,” she said then, “I’ve come to see you not simply because some sort of courtesy visit from the Republic’s chief executive is so long overdue, but also because I find myself in a quandary. A deep and, to be honest, very difficult one.”

DRM (...) represent(s) an exercise in mindless stupidity that would shame any self-respecting dinosaur
Eric Flint; http://www.baens-universe.com/articles/principle
Random pithy quote: Never take life seriously. Nobody gets out alive anyway.. (jiltanith.thefifthimperium.com)

Zitat von »David Weber«

Honor’s tone was supposed to be firmly commanding. It actually came out about midway between a command, a request, and an admission of defeat, and she tasted Hamish’s unbecoming amusement as his offspring shook his head stubbornly.

Again.

“No,” Raoul Alfred Alastair Alexander-Harrington said with the invincible stubbornness of his twenty-one months.

“They’re good for you,” she persisted. “Besides, you like them.”

“No,” he repeated, despite the fact that he did normally like them, and sent his spoon flying across the dining room table.

“Raoul —!” Her own valiantly suppressed laughter eroded the sternness of her tone.

“Want ’paghetti,” he announced.

“You’re having peas,” she informed him.

“’paghetti!” he insisted, and she tasted his very self-centered delight in expressing his independence.

“No spaghetti,” she said sternly. A mother, even one who spent so much time in space, had to draw the line somewhere, she figured. “Peas.”

“’paghetti!”

“Peas!”

She sat back, crossing her arms, and regarded him with a frosty maternal eye.

“You so do not want to go there, Hamish Erwin MacGregor Simpson Alexander-Harrington,” she told him ominously, never looking away from their son.

“You do seem to be having a bit of a problem, Honor,” Emily Alexander-Harrington observed.

Her life-support chair was parked beside their daughter Katherine’s highchair while she supervised Katherine’s dinner. Which, Honor observed, seemed to be going somewhat more smoothly than their son’s. Emily couldn’t actually feed Katherine herself, given the fact that she had only limited use of one hand, but she smiled encouragingly at the toddler’s green peas-smeared face and got a huge answering smile in return.

Honor would have preferred to put that down to the fact that Emily had the home-court advantage. It was true that the weeks on end that Honor spent aboard Imperator limited the time she had with their children. There’d been times — more than she could count — when she’d bitterly resented that as Raoul and Katherine raced from babes-in-arms, to self-propelled quadrupeds, to shaky steps, to determined, hyper-velocity toddlers shrieking with laughter as they dodged around the nursery, playing keep away with nannies and treecats. She’d missed so much of that transformation, and she could never get it back again, and she knew it.

You’re not the only parent who’s ever been stuck aboard ship while her kids grew up without her, she reminded herself sternly. And you’re a heck of a lot luckier than most of those other parents were! You’re at least close enough to home that you can get there for visits every couple of weeks. And, she admitted, when you are here, you can actually taste their mind-glows. That’s something no other parent — no other two-leg parent, she corrected, glancing at Samantha and Nimitz — has ever been able to do. Something Emily can’t do. Or, really, something else she can’t do.

Her mood darkened briefly as she watched Sandra Thurston wipe the outer few centimeters of pea paste off Katherine’s chin. While Katherine appeared far more amenable to the evening’s menu, she still plied her own spoon with more enthusiasm than precision, although, to be fair, peas were less spectacular than the results she could achieve with Raoul’s favored “’paghetti.”

DRM (...) represent(s) an exercise in mindless stupidity that would shame any self-respecting dinosaur
Eric Flint; http://www.baens-universe.com/articles/principle
Random pithy quote: Never take life seriously. Nobody gets out alive anyway.. (jiltanith.thefifthimperium.com)

Zitat von »David Weber«

There was no trace of self-pity in Emily’s mind-glow as she watched Sandra do what she couldn’t, but that only made Honor more aware of her senior wife’s loss. And she seemed so tired again. It was almost —

She put that th0ught aside and returned her attention to Raoul.

“No ’paghetti,” she said firmly.

He sat back in his highchair, looking at her stubbornly with almond-shaped brown eyes very like the ones she saw in the mirror, and she tasted the developing mind behind them as it grappled with the problem. His ability to put sentences together lagged considerably behind his ability to comprehend what was said to him. According to the pediatricians, that was to be expected at his age. In fact, his spoken vocabulary was well ahead of the norm. He had at least a hundred words in his mental vault by now, and he was adding at least a half-dozen a day. And he did take a certain delight in using them to affirm his independence.

That, too, was right on the curve, she thought. Of course, some children were more stubborn than others. Raoul definitely fitted into that category. Undoubtedly the fault of his father’s genetic contribution.

"No ’paghetti?" he said after a moment.

"No ’paghetti," she confirmed in a no-nonsense, listen-to-your-mother tone.

He cocked his head, and she twitched internally as something . . . brushed at the corner of her mind. That wasn’t the right verb, but that was because there wasn’t a "right verb” for what she was experiencing, and her eyes widened. She’d thought she was sensing something once or twice before, but she’d never been certain, and each time she’d convinced herself she was imagining things. This time she couldn’t, and her eyes slid sideways to Sun Heart, the senior female of the half-dozen ’cats who’d immigrated to White Haven.

In many ways, Sun Heart was Lindsey Phillips’s co-nanny where both children were concerned. A “retired” elder of Bright Water Clan, she wasn’t a memory singer, like Samantha, but she was over a hundred T-years old and the mother of “hands of hands” — the vagueness of treecat arithmetic could be frustrating on occasion — of kittens of her own. Most of them were full adults now, which freed her to focus on the two-leg offspring of Death Fang’s Bane Clan, and she — and all of Bright Water’s ’cats took their responsibilities seriously. Although Sun Heart tended to spend her nights sleeping on the foot of Raoul’s bed, her mate, Bark Master, spent every night on Katherine’s to be sure both bases were covered.

Honor had never been able to decide all the reasons the treecats did that. Partly, she knew from her own ability to taste their mind-glows, it was because all of the ’cats loved the kids so deeply. And it was because they were determined that nothing would harm either of them. But there was something else going on, as well. Something she suspected not even the ’cats fully understood. There was a complex, subtle . . . flow between Raoul and his furry guardians. Katherine was a bright, sunny, incredibly smart little girl, but without that interwoven tapestry. Sun Heart had made it clear to all of the various parental two-legs that Raoul and Katherine were almost certain to be adopted when they were older, when their mind-glows had settled a bit. But there was more than that at play here, and she suddenly wondered how her own ability to taste the treecats’ mind-glows might have looked if she could have seen it from the outside.

Now Sun Heart met her questioning gaze — and the more pointed question of her emotions — with a calm, grass-green gaze. Then she flipped her ears in the equivalent of a shrug.

Lot of help that was, Honor thought dryly, and Sun Heart bleeked in soft laughter that was echoed from Nimitz and Samantha.

“If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem,” she told the furrier members of the dinner party. “I think —”

“’ellery,” Raoul interrupted with the air of a high-level diplomat offering up a compromise solution.

“You need to eat more than just celery,” Honor responded. She wasn’t sure whether Raoul really liked celery or if his craving for it owed more to watching the treecats devour it.

Or, she thought, thinking about that subtle flow of mind-glows, maybe he actually . . . I don’t know . . . experiences whatever it is they get out of eating it. I’ve certainly tasted Mister Gobble Guts’s fondness for it!

Nimitz bleeked a harder laugh.

“The peas were only one thing you were trying to get down him,” Hamish pointed out. “Maybe you’ve got an opening wedge.”

“Oh yes?” She turned to give him a withering glance. “Do you have any idea how hard it was for my mom to get back any ground she ever yielded to me?”

“I don’t have to. I know how hard it’s been for me and Emily!” He shook his head. “I’m just saying that sometimes a canny tactician settles for a partial victory rather than reinforcing failure.”

“You to do realize you’re feeding a child, not fighting a battle?” Emily asked. Then she paused, thought a moment, and shook her head. “Forget I said that.”

“Truer words were never spoken,” Honor said, returning her attention to Raoul.

“No peas, you get the celery, but you have to eat the mac-and-cheese and drink every drop of the milk,” she countered. “Deal?”

He pondered carefully, considering every aspect of the proposed compromise. She could tell that the “I’m-a-big-boy” corner of his mind wanted to lay down additional conditions. Fortunately, she had a hole card. The Meyerdahl genetic mods were hard-coded, which meant he’d inherited her metabolism. Debating what he was going to eat might turn into a tussle, but there was no doubt he was going to eat something. Keeping the Meyerdahl furnace stoked was a full-time occupation. So she sat back, arms folded, and waited him out. He wavered back and forth for a moment, then nodded.

“’eal,” he said firmly. “But ’ellery first!”

“Done,” she sighed, and reached out to remove a stalk of celery from Nimitz’ tray. The treecat bleeked indignantly, and she snorted. “You’re so darned amused by all this, you can provide the celery,” she told him.

Raoul didn’t care where it had come from. He grinned from ear to ear, grabbed his prize, and started to chew.

“Now, if only the Sollies were that easy,” Hamish said.

“The Sollies don’t have a clue about real stubbornness,” Honor informed him with crushing scorn.

DRM (...) represent(s) an exercise in mindless stupidity that would shame any self-respecting dinosaur
Eric Flint; http://www.baens-universe.com/articles/principle
Random pithy quote: Never take life seriously. Nobody gets out alive anyway.. (jiltanith.thefifthimperium.com)

Zitat von »David Weber«

“I can’t compel you to do anything without killing more of your ships, Admiral,” she said flatly, “and between the two of us, I think enough people have already died today. So here’s my proposition. You take your surviving ships, and you get the hell out of Hypatia. I’m sure the Hypatians will take care of rescuing all your surviving personnel, assuming they can stop trying to save the civilians — the children — the Solarian League is willing to murder to make a political statement. If you don’t want to do that, that’s fine. You’ve got ten minutes to make up your mind. If you decide to stay, then I suppose you and I will find out how many more of your battlecruisers I can take out, one-by-one, until you — or your successor — finally figure out where I really am and manage to return fire. Of course, even when you do, my defenses are designed to stand up to Manticoran missile fire, aren’t they? And, trust me, I’m one hell of a lot faster than anything you’ve got. You can’t find me, you can’t hit me, you can’t catch me, and you damned well can’t outrun me.

“So you make up your mind, Admiral Yountz. You tell me what you’re going to do and whether or not I’m going have to start killing more Sollies today after all.

DRM (...) represent(s) an exercise in mindless stupidity that would shame any self-respecting dinosaur
Eric Flint; http://www.baens-universe.com/articles/principle
Random pithy quote: Never take life seriously. Nobody gets out alive anyway.. (jiltanith.thefifthimperium.com)

Zitat von »David Weber«

He shook his head again, this time heavily.

“All Kotouč and his people could do would be to die gallantly, Mister Yale. I don’t doubt they’d do that in a minute . . . if it could stop Hajdu. But it couldn’t. They might be able to hurt him badly first, but not badly enough to stop him from carrying out his orders in the end, and no military commander could justify throwing away his own people’s lives when the sacrifice couldn’t make any difference in the end.”

“So what do we do?” Vice President Morris said after a moment.

“We go on doing what we’re already doing,” Vangelis replied heavily. “We’ve got every orbit-capable shuttle, cutter, runabout, and garbage scow in the system moving everyone we possibly can in the time Hajdu’s so graciously given us. There’s already been some panic — you just can’t organize an evacuation on this kind of scale without telling people why you’re evacuating them — but so far, it’s manageable. Commodore Nisyrios’s people are providing armed parties for the major habitats’ boat bays to prevent — we hope — things from getting too out of hand, and we’re beginning with the major residential habitats. We should — should, probably — be able to get between eighty and eighty-five percent of the residents down to the planetary surface in thirty-six hours. That’s almost a hundred and nine million people.”

“And it still leaves eighteen-point-seven million people up there,” Morris said.

“And another one-point-two million in the Alexandria Belt,” Roanoke said. “My God. We’re talking about twenty million dead as our best case scenario!”

She looked around the conference room’s frozen-helium silence, and the clatter of a falling pin would have been deafening.

DRM (...) represent(s) an exercise in mindless stupidity that would shame any self-respecting dinosaur
Eric Flint; http://www.baens-universe.com/articles/principle
Random pithy quote: Never take life seriously. Nobody gets out alive anyway.. (jiltanith.thefifthimperium.com)

Davids Schreibpläne

David posted this on facebook and i thought i should cross post it here (Also Toni responded to my question saying she did indeed purchase The Gordian Protocol, i did promise that *I* woulkdn't start the Earc calls on the bar):
David Wrote:

Zitat

I could swear I answered this earlier somewhere online, but I can't find that post anywhere. So, in response to people who asked about where I am on current projects and what's likely to be coming next.

UNCOMPROMISING HONOR is due out in October, and the first third of it has just been posted on my official site.

I have handed in the submission draft of THROUGH FIERY TRIALS, Safehold #10, which is due out in January. Originally, it had been scheduled for November, but Baen and Tor got together and rescheduled it so that it wouldn't be going head-to-head with UC. I thought it had been rescheduled for March; I only found out/realized it had been scheduled for January after I handed the book in. It took me a lot longer to write than I had anticipated because my original approach to the story simply wasn't working. Over half of it was turning into flashback, so I decided I had to tell the story that was being flashed back to instead of having so much reflection on the part of the characters. I think the second approach worked very well and I'm pleased with it, but there's no denying that I shorted Tor's production staff on the lead time they needed without realizing the extent to which that was true.

I have also finished three novellas/short stories (including the one that I recently handed into Larry Correia for his femme fatale anthology coming out sometime next year) and I have been generally clearing the decks for my next foray.

I've handed in a revised draft of a collaboration with Jacob Holowach, THE GORDIAN PROTOCOL, which Toni Weisskopff is reading now.

Tim Zahn, Tom, and I (and especially Tim and Tom, at this point) are working on A CALL TO INSURRECTION.

Eric Flint and I spent some time at Manticon talking about the next Anton and Victor book, and I need to get our story notes written up and emailed to him. I promise that I really am not going to let that fall through the cracks. (If I do, Eric will beat on me.)

I have pitched to Tor Books the notion of doing the sequel to OUT OF THE DARK as a collaboration with Chris Kennedy. I'd really like to get that book written because one of the major characters is suffering from a bit of in-universe . . . misperception that needs to be cleared up. I don't think I'm going to be able to fit it into my schedule without some help, however (see below).

My next solo project for Baen will be the sequel to SWORD OF THE SOUTH, and it's probable that the next solo project after THAT will be the sequel to THROUGH FIERY TRIALS, for Tor.

And as soon as Joelle and I can get our schedules to align (I've been really busy; she's working on her first solo novel; AND she's a new mother), we will be returning to the Multiverse and the sequel to THE ROAD TO HELL. We know exactly where that universe needs to go, but it actually requires a lot more preplanning and notetaking than most of my other literary universes for a lot of reasons.

Now, having said all of that, it is likely that I'm going to be doing more collaborative projects in that same timeframe and moving forward. There are several reasons for that. One is that I've realized that I need to cut down on my output. For years, I did somewhere around 750,000 words a year, but I'm not in my 30s or my 40s anymore. I'll be 66 this year, and I've come to the conclusion that if I'm going to edit myself as tightly as I really need to be editing, then I'm going to have to limit my production to something more like FIVE HUNDRED thousand words. One of the consequences of that is that it has been forcibly born in upon me that I am not going to have time to tell all the stories rattling around inside my brain. I may not be antediluvian, but I ain't no spring chicken anymore, either. So I have decided that I have to enlist help to get all (or, at least, as many as possible of) those stories told, and I've always been more comfortable working with collaborators than some writers. After all, the very first novel I sold was a collaboration with Steve White and, overall, I play pretty well with others.

Another reason is that come June or July of next year, it will be thirty years since I made my first professional sale has a novelist when Toni Weisskopff, speaking for Jim Baen, bought INSURRECTION from Steve and me. It's time I start paying it forward a little bit, and if I'm in a position to help people who I think are good, strong writers reach a wider readership by collaborating with me — whether it's in the Honorverse or in an entirely new literary universe(s) like the GORDIAN PROTOCOL — then I should.

I do have a few hard and fast rules about doing collaborations, however. For one thing, I won't do them just to increase output. I hate literary sharecropping. There is a difference between simply trying to get titles out there and looking for help to tell stories you wouldn't have time to tell otherwise, and that difference is a very clear distinction in my mind when I look at projects and potential co-writers. I also won't do a collaboration unless I'm convinced that the final product will be AT LEAST as good as either of the writing partners would have done writing solo. And I won't do a collaboration unless I expect to learn something or to teach something in the process. And I should point out that I have NEVER done a collaboration in which I didn't learn SOMETHING along the way.

Collaborating is far easier today than it used to be. As both Eric and I have commented elsewhere, the Internet means that writers can collaborate across state lines, across national borders, or even across oceans, as readily as they used to be able to collaborate if they lived in the same house or next door to each other. That means I can have multiple projects underway simultaneously and to be literally an email away from all of my writing partners at the same time. That doesn't mean I'm going to be able to make all of my schedules align, or that I will suddenly magically be able to undertake all of the writing projects I wish I could undertake. But I figure that for an old fart pushing 66, I ain't doing all that bad.

I'm not planning on shuffling off anytime soon, but there are stories that I really, really want to get told and there are people who I'd like to work with deeply enough so that if something happened to me (God forbid), series readers have invested decades in won't just stop in mid-sentence without someone else who knows and loves the characters and the universes being in a position to bring at least some closure to them.

So that's where I am.

DRM (...) represent(s) an exercise in mindless stupidity that would shame any self-respecting dinosaur
Eric Flint; http://www.baens-universe.com/articles/principle
Random pithy quote: Never take life seriously. Nobody gets out alive anyway.. (jiltanith.thefifthimperium.com)